When my father came home at dinner time, he collapsed onto his bamboo chaise longue and called me to his side. Flanked by my twin sisters Ella and Ina, I was still dizzy from the pain in my legs. Without saying a word, my father sat up and lashed out with his fist. I fell to the floor and blacked out. When I came to, my sisters were standing there pleading and sobbing, and I had peed my pants.
So you pissed yourself in fear too? Like we did when you came charging over to give us a thrashing. Even so I can’t feel sorry for you, Pa. You’re going to have to come up with a lot more misery to change that.
Ella and Ina took me back to my room. The babus washed me and laid me on my bed. When my father appeared in the doorway, Wolf bared his teeth again. My father vanished but returned with a rifle and took aim. Pointing the barrel at Wolf, he said coolly, ‘Tie that dog to your bed, or I’ll blow him to pieces and you along with him.’
My father had a wooden rack with six hunting rifles. It stood in the dining room, next to a cabinet that held all kinds of ammunition. His collection consisted of four double-barrelled shotguns, 16 and 12 calibre, a six-round Winchester repeating rifle and a small firearm known as a tjies. This last model was the smallest rifle among hunters in the Indies. Every boy had to learn to handle one as part of his upbringing. Once you could shoot straight with a tjies, you got to practise with the heavier firearms.
Baldy goes to European Public School
We moved to a house on the other side of Koninginnelaan. When I was nearly six, Mama had to submit a request to the Resident of Surabaya so that I could attend the European Public Primary School.
Extract from the Register of Decisions taken by
the Resident of Surabaya.
Surabaya, 29th July 1931
No. 367/31.
HAVING READ:
a. the petition dated Surabaya, 17 June 1931 made by Sie Swan Nio residing at Koninginnelaan No. 28 in the regional capital of Surabaya, requesting that her son named AREND, 6 years old, be admitted to Public European Primary School C in this city,
b. and further
In consideration of the fact that the applicant’s elder children – full siblings of Arend – have been lawfully admitted to the above-mentioned educational institution and with a view to ensuring that the children from one and the same family receive a similar upbringing, this present request for admission should also be granted.
In light of the above
It has been decided that:
Arend, the son of Sie Swan Nio, who resides in Surabaya, be admitted to year one of the 1st European Public Primary School C in Surabaya
EXTRACT issued to the interested party for reference and information purposes.
In agreement with the pre-school Register, The Assistant-Resident Secretary.
[signature illegible]
And so my bald head and I began to attend European Public School. The other children knew that I was illegitimate, a bastard in common parlance. In colonial Java, parentage counted for much more than it does in the Netherlands. The schoolmistress was nice, but if I made the slightest mistake I was caned and made to stand in the corner. Despite the bullying, I advanced to second year and third year. At that age, I had to attend Sunday school every week. Under the regime of a teacher named Claproth, we had to learn Bible passages by heart and if we failed to do so, we would catch it with the cane. Mr Claproth also used to slap us with the back of his hand, a gold ring on almost every finger. I came home with lumps on my head and dried blood around my mouth. At first, my mother and my brothers shouted at me, assuming that I had deserved my punishment. But one Sunday my brothers came with me to Sunday school to see for themselves. When I emerged from the class with yet more lumps on my head, they waited until Mr Claproth appeared with his bag and his notorious cane in hand. My big brother Jacob strolled up to him and without saying a word let fly with his fist. The man fell to the floor and lay there dazed. He eventually got to his feet, only to find himself eye to eye with my brother Karel, who subjected him to an expert beating. Other teachers came running and they too made the acquaintance of Jacob’s fists. My eldest brother demanded that they give me extra homework as a punishment instead of a beating. From that day on, I received no more abuse from my teachers.
Even so, my upbringing at home remained tough and ruthless. If I came home one minute after six, Jacob and Karel would be on hand to give me a good thrashing.
Thank you for this insight, Pa. If I came home one minute after five, you would knock me from one end of the hall to the other. I also took a beating when my little brothers were late home, since I was the one charged with rounding them up and making sure they were in on time. If they were playing hide and seek and it took me too long to find them, I would thump them all the way home so that they would have no sympathy for me when I received their share of your blows.
At the back of the house, Ella and Ina were waiting to give me a hiding with the cane. Mama finished the job, wielding a branch. At the end of this calvary, it was up to the sobbing babus to comfort me. They would take me to the bathroom and wash me. Kokkie would abandon her pans on the stove for a while to fetch me clean clothes. I have often thought back on these humiliations, but I can find no reason for them.
I can: backward eighteenth-century colonial ways. One Willem van Hogendorp raised the issue of the senseless beating in his novella Kraspukol; Or the Dismal Consequences of Excessive Severity towards Slaves (An Edifying Tale) from 1780. In his account the culprits were not Dutchmen or Chinese, but mestizos, people of mixed Portuguese and Javanese blood… Indos, if you will. It’s tough to be an Indo, eh Pa?
On my eighth birthday I received a brand-new bicycle, made in Japan. I was over the moon and set out to explore the city. One Sunday I decided to go fishing near the port offices at Tanjung Perak. My brothers kitted me out with a bag of bait and a small bamboo fishing rod. On the way I bought a young coconut to quench my thirst in the heat of Surabaya.
Arriving at the port, I found myself a quiet spot by a narrow beach. I laid my bike on the ground, settled down and cast my line. After catching a few fish, I spotted one that seemed to be gasping for air. I jumped into the water and waded to where it was flapping about. Before I knew what was happening, I felt myself being sucked down into the mud. Quicksand! I was so paralysed with fear that I could not even cry for help. Deeper and deeper I sank, until I was in over my head. I swallowed seawater, reached for the surface, then everything went black. A strange but wonderful sensation came over me. Life no longer mattered, I was prepared to die, to be free of the beatings at home, the shame of my bald head and the stones the other children threw at me. Underwater, I saw a sudden, brilliant light and was overcome by feelings of bliss. Just as I was passing out, I felt myself being pulled up by the arms.
I woke to see faces swimming into focus above me. The faces of three white sailors. One of them made me stick my fingers down my throat so that I would throw up. To wash away the filthy taste of seawater, they gave me something sweet to drink.
Back home, I told my mother what had happened. To my amazement, there was no punishment. Instead, our kokkie cooked for me, serving up the fish I had caught with steamed rice and vegetables.
Karel teaches me to fight
I was skinny as a young boy, and when I turned ten my brother Karel decided it was time to toughen me up. He could no longer bear to see me coming home with my bald head covered in bumps and bruises. He started by making me get up every morning at six. After a quick wash and brush-up, I had to jog a couple of blocks wearing only my underpants. Karel jogged with me. As I ran, I had to feint and throw punches in the air, and when we got home, he made me lift barbells with heavy weights. At six-thirty I took a bath, followed by breakfast and a mad dash to school. When I came home in the afternoon, I had something to eat, took a short nap and then did chin-ups on the high bar in the garden. Next I had to take a shower and keep my eyes open as I looked up at the streaming water. That was the hardest test of all. For months all I coul
d feel was pain and when the pain disappeared, Karel dripped lemon juice into my eyes to toughen me up even more. Six months later, I could see the drops of water coming towards me in the shower and my reaction time had become much faster.
Uncle Soen joined forces with Karel. They became my instructors in the garden, where Wolf was constantly on the alert for intruders and Bear, tethered by a long chain, rummaged around under the tamarind tree. My instructors pelted me with pebbles, which I had to fend off with the backs of my hands. They threw sticks for me to parry using classical Chinese martial arts techniques. I was fifteen before I learned to parry knives, a skill both Uncle Soen and Karel possessed.
Uncle Soen was a smallish man, five feet four at most, while my brother Jacob was over six feet tall. Jacob trained with barbells and had a naturally athletic build. Yet I saw Uncle Soen take hold of Jacob’s wrist and paralyse him completely for five seconds. He did this to protect me when Jacob attacked me for the umpteenth time. Uncle Soen called him a ‘filthy animal’ and sent him to his room. My uncle walked with a limp, the result of a childhood bout of polio, but in his hands he had a kind of elemental strength. He often visited us and in his presence I felt safe. If he was not around, Aunty Kiep would come and look after me. Whenever Jacob turned nasty, she would stand between us and scream bloody murder at him in a language all her own, a mix of Dutch, Malay and Chinese not unlike my mother’s.
Of course, we had neighbours on Koninginnelaan. A few doors down, there was Mr and Mrs Van Baak, an elderly couple who kept a beautiful collection of birds in their back garden. They were always pleased to see me and let me in so that I could marvel at the enormous aviaries and learn the birds’ names off by heart. They had an elegant home, with rooms full of antiques, porcelain and glass.
A couple of houses further along lived the Van Geel family. They had a magnificent collection of antique Chinese and Japanese vases, and their daughter Ilse was a charming girl, who used to tell me Chinese and Japanese fairy tales.
Next to the Van Geels lived an Indo family by the name of Wetzel. Their daughter Lien was my age. She loved to stroke and kiss my shaved head. More used to cutting words and hard blows, this was something I detested. When Lien came and sat on my lap to lavish kisses on that bald head of mine, I would wrestle free and walk off. This made her angry and she would fire insults at me, and sometimes even scratch and hit and bite. I never hit her back. To hit a girl was cowardly in my eyes.
Another local family were the Zweerts, and I was good friends with their three sons. Across from the Zweerts lived the Perazzos, a Jewish family with a son and two daughters, very kind people.
Our next door neighbours on the left were a Japanese couple, both of whom worked at the Chiyoda department store on Tunjungan. Shortly before war broke out, it was revealed that they were Japanese spies with military ranks. But as a boy I was too naive to understand such things.
Our other next-door neighbours were the Altmanns. They were German and had two grown-up sons and a late arrival my own age. I didn’t get on with the eldest son at all. In fact I disliked the whole family. Both of the older boys were bruisers, always shooting their mouths off. Their hobby was playing with four fully grown pythons, ten to fifteen feet long.
My twelfth birthday
On my twelfth birthday I screwed up all my courage and asked my father to let me grow my hair so that I would no longer be bullied at school. After a lengthy conclave with Mama, my brothers and sisters, my request was finally granted, on condition that I passed my secondary school entrance exam. As a lawyer, Papa wanted me to follow in his footsteps, but Jacob and Karel thought I should study engineering. I narrowly failed the exam and my family made me repeat my final year. Although Papa still saw the need for it, I no longer had to have my head shaved.
By this time a bitter conflict had developed between Papa and Jacob about Papa’s refusal to recognize us as his children and to allow us to bear the surname Nolan. In protest, Jacob decided to change his name to Nolans. Karel took a more measured approach: he simply adopted Papa’s surname, Nolan, regardless of whether it was legal or not. I understood very little of the background to this quarrel and followed Karel’s example. But at school they continued to see me as a bastard. In so many words, I was and would remain Arend Sie, Sie Arend, or ‘Arend Sie who goes by the name Nolan’. To my Indonesian friends, I was Si-Arend, but my father’s wealthy background meant they often called me Si-Arto or Arto for short, a play on the word for ‘money’. Indonesian names such as Soegiharto and Soeharto were often shortened to Harto or corrupted as Arto. Even my own family called me Arto sometimes.
It was mainly the Indo coterie – Eurasian families with a higher status – who looked down on me. Hollanders were less inclined to do so, and the Germans had no such airs and graces. Jacob, Karel, Ella and Ina had the good fortune to be born light-skinned, but I was as dark as my great grandmother Rabina, who prior to her marriage had been a lady-in-waiting at the sultanate of Pamekasan.
Where did you get that nonsense, Pa? Talk family history with any Indo and an abducted princess or the like is bound to pop up before long. The same way every Hollander can dredge up a family coat of arms. What do you mean ‘lady-in-waiting’? And what was that grandfather of yours doing in that sultanate anyway? Give it a rest man, with your stupid Indo fairy tales. That’s the colonial Indies in a nutshell: always casting back for some princess or courtier in your ancestry.
Tensions rose between Jacob and Papa. Jacob poured all his energy into boxing, a warning to Papa to forget any ideas he might have about hitting him. Jacob was a heavyweight. Karel was slender, as was I, and practised all kinds of martial arts such as judo, jujitsu, pencak silat, kuntao (a form of taekwondo) and wielded the three-pronged weapon known as the sia. Instead of deferring to Papa, my brothers began to take more family decisions themselves, one of which was to send me to Queen Emma School, a technical college, to study mechanical engineering. This was much to Papa’s dismay.
Around that time, I began to go out with an Indo girl called Hermina, but when her mother found out that I was an illegitimate Nolan, she was strictly forbidden from seeing me. Hermina protested loudly, as did her brother and both her sisters, but in vain. In her mother’s eyes, I was cursed, tarred and feathered. Standing on the porch of their house one day, my heart sank as I listened to the quarrels raging inside. The pain was too much, and I slunk away without a word to anyone.
The deaths of Bear and Wolf
Late one afternoon, Papa came home and was greeted as usual by Bear, who had grown as tall as Jacob. Papa was in the habit of feeding Bear a couple of sugar lumps but on this occasion he was in a foul mood and instead rapped him on the nose with his walking stick. Bear let out a ferocious growl, pulled his chain from its anchor and lunged at Papa. Uncle Soen picked up a branch that had fallen from the tamarind tree and began to beat Bear with it. Karel and Jacob heard the commotion and both grabbed a double-barrelled hunting rifle from the rack on the dining room wall. Quick as a flash, they loaded their weapons and fired two shots each. The animal fell dead at Papa’s feet. Instead of thanking his sons for saving his life, Papa swore loudly and began to rant and rave.
I lay on the ground with my body pressed against Bear’s for a long time. Indoors, the quarrels about the incident raged into the night. My brothers buried Bear in the garden by moonlight. Days later, I lost Wolf when he was run over by a car. I buried him beside Bear with my own hands.
Shooting practice
With primary school behind me, Jacob thought it was high time I learned to handle a gun. As stated previously, this was a tradition among boys in the Indies. It was my job to clean and grease the rifles, and, even though one of those weapons had killed Bear, holding them in my hands filled me with pride.
The roofs of our home on Koninginnelaan were pointed, and bats hung from the eaves. An old outbuilding behind the garage served as a scullery where Mama brewed and bottled her kecap to bring in a little extra money. It was a dirty little sha
ck, crawling with rats and mice. At first, I practised on the bats. During the day, I shot them down from the eaves and burned the bodies in a pit at the bottom of the garden.
In the evenings, Karel and I would take up positions on the floor of the attic above the garage, equipped with a torch. Karel handled the Winchester and I had the tjies, a small 5.8 millimetre hunting rifle. We took turns shining the torch on the run-down scullery in search of mice and rats. Mice were the hardest to hit, especially with a tjies. But every Indo boy had to learn on that thing; it was tradition. We took turns: I aimed at the rats, Karel at the mice. If we got bored, we would line up empty tins in the garden and practise with the Winchester repeating rifle. Mama, Jacob and Uncle Soen looked on approvingly. I grew to love firing guns. It gave me confidence, even though I went to school unarmed.
The Interpreter from Java Page 9